[distcc] Re: Red Hat packaging patch for 0.15

[Chris Halls]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 10:14:57AM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> The problem then is that you may have files or processes hanging
> around with no name for their uid, which is confusing.

It is probably brief-lived enough not to worry too much, as long as the
package does a reasonable job of making sure no old temporary files are
around, and the only thing expected to live on for a few seconds is a
running compiler process, and even that is unlikely to happen in most real
world situations.

> On brief inspection, Debian seems to not remove users when the
> packages are removed.  uids are plentiful.

That is a bug - packages are supposed to remove their uids on purge and I
think most already do.  Did you maybe look at packages which have been
removed but not purged?

The Debian distcc package removes the user, logfile and inetd entry in the
postrm script:

case "$1" in
    purge)
        echo y|update-inetd --remove 4200 > /dev/null 2>&1
        rm -rf /var/log/distccd.log
        if id distccd >/dev/null; then
            # Careful!  Never destroy home dir (/), and deluser can be
            # configured to always do that (there's no
            # --no-remove-home flag)
            userdel distccd
        fi
        ;;

Chris